Image Processing for Protein Detection in the Egg Using a Micro Fluidics System

Micro fluidics system has great attention in recent years because of their interdisciplinary nature. It has a wide application in various fields, especially in biomedical applications. In a food, protein is one of essential element to grow the body therefore it becomes significant test the protein level in food. Egg is the common food used in daily diet to fulfill the need of protein. Egg protein testing is carried out in laboratories in traditional way that consumes the reagents (CuSO4 and NaOH) in bulk, requires lengthy reaction times as sample quantity more. Micro-fluidics eliminated these limitations as quantity of sample and reagent is too less. This research focuses on Image processing algorithm for the detection of protein in egg samples. The image processing algorithm is based on color detection as the protein level is indicated by faint to dark violet i.e. low protein to high protein respectively. In this work microchannel for microfluidics system has been designed and fabricated by using soft lithography method. The mould for microchannel has been fabricated using CO2 Laser machining on PMMA (methyl methacrylate) material and Channel has been fabricated by using PDMS (polydimethylsiloxane) material. Images for 10% to 100% protein level of known sample at the interval of 10% have been collected from outlet at the cannel by using camera. The collected images of known sample have been imported for image processing and datasets have been created. Randomly, the known samples have been tested for the validation.